Mekong hits highest level in 100 years

BANGKOK — Four people have been killed in flooding and landslides in Laos, where the Mekong River has hit its highest level in at least 100 years after several months of unusually heavy rain, officials said on Friday.

The communist government and private citizens in the landlocked Southeast Asian country have been rushing to complete a 2.5-metre wall of sandbags to stop water inundating the capital, Vientiane.

Police have closed roads leading to the riverbank to make it easier for trucks delivering sandbags, the official Vientiane Times reported.

"We've been fighting very hard day and night for four days, but after today the water level should recede," government spokesman Yong Chanhthalansy told Reuters in Bangkok.

The Mekong, which starts in the glaciers of Tibet and ends 4,350 kilometres away in the rice-rich delta of southern Vietnam, hit 13.68 metres in Vientiane on Thursday, trouncing a high of 12.38 metres recorded in 1966, the worst floods in living memory.

That depth – measured roughly from the river's lowest level in the dry season – could rise slightly on Friday before retreating, Mr. Yong said.

Vietnam was recently hit by heavy rains, floods and mudslides as the remnants of a tropical storm caused the country's worst floods in four decades. At least 120 people were killed and another 44 remain missing.

In Vientiane, a levee built along the Mekong's northern bank after the 1966 flooding has been overrun in places, causing flooding in parts of the city of 200,000, one resident said.

There had been widespread flooding upstream and north of Vientiane, although the former royal capital of Luang Prabang had escaped with no damage to its ancient Buddhist pagodas, Mr. Yong said.

Downstream, eastern Thailand and low-lying Cambodia, where the annual flooding of the Mekong is crucial to rice and fish production, are braced for the rising waters. Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, sits right on the bank of the river.

Government officials said they had warned people living near the Mekong in the provinces of Kompong Cham, Kratie and Stung Treng to move their families and livestock to higher ground.